RISC-V is the “new” CPU architecture

No. The kernel does not care about X11 vs Wayland. Or rather, both X11 and Wayland use KMS ( Kernel Mode Setting ) and DRM ( Direct Rendering ) these days. That is, both X11 and Wayland call on the same kernel features.

Not a fork of course but there is Redox

https://www.redox-os.org/

Yes. Thank you. My question (or point) was how you know that the package needs to be updated? As you point out, I need to do that for dependencies as well.

You are certainly correct though. You can pull AUR packages and build them without yay or paru.

I was thinking mostly of iso images I guess. You are talking about package updates.

First, fair point.

That said, for package updates, are there not Alpine mirrors? You do not need much bandwidth to feed out to the mirrors.

But I agree that, ultimately, they are going to have to find a home for the package repos if they want to directly feed their install base.

As for “the other costs”, those do not seem to have anything to do with their hosting going away.

Um. Ya, I guess. Ok.

First, how do you keep that package up to date?

Real question though is, do you really think that is better than “yay -S AURpackagehere” or even “paru AURpackagehere”?

I am a massive Distrobox fan. I do not use it for security though.

• create environments for specific purposes: dev, testing, cybersecurity work, video, AI, etc
• access to the full app library of any distro
• isolation of multiple large apps for easy and complete removal when you are done with them
• use Glibc apps on your MUSL distro
• install apps easily on an immutable distro
• total compatibility ( eg. Legally install a real RHEL9 Distrobox for free )
• ”try out” an unfamiliar distro without a VM
• experiment and break things without messing up your main system
• separate your distro base from your userland ( eg. Minimal Debian Stable install with pretty much all apps coming from an Arch Linux Distrobox ). Rock solid stability of the base system paired with a massive ecosystem of up-to-date packages.

Ya. Ok. But pacman does not let you use the AUR. Using the AUR is one did the primary reasons to choose Arch.

So, if you want to use the AUR, you need to use something like yay or paru. And, if you do, you no longer need to use pacman.

To be clear to the newbies, pacman -Syu updates your entire system ( except packages from the AUR ). yay -Syu updates your entire system, including packages from the AUR.

If you just ran yay -Syu, running pacman -Syu will report that there is “nothing to do” since your system will already be up to date.

The same is true if you sub paru for yay above.

If you go the EOS route, yay is already installed.

We have this guy saying we cannot build all the Alpine packages once to share with all Alpine users. Unsustainable!

On the other hand, we have the Gentoo crowd advocating for rebuilding everything from source for every single machine.

In the middle, we have CachyOS building the same x86-64 packages multiple times for machines with tiny differences in the CPU flags they support.

The problem is distribution more than building anyway I would think. You could probably create enough infrastructure to support building Alpine for everybody on the free tier of Oracle Cloud. But you are not going to have enough bandwidth for everybody to download it from there.

But Flatpak does not solve the bandwidth problem any better (it just moves the problem to somebody else).

Then again, there are probably more Apline bits being downloaded from Docker Hub than anywhere else.

Even though I was joking above, I kind of mean it. The article says they have two CI/CD “servers” and one dev box. This is 2025. Those can all be containers or virtual machines. I am not even joking that the free tier of Oracle Cloud ( or wherever ) would do it. To quote the web, “you can run a 4-core, 24GB machine with a 200GB disk 24/7 and it should not cost you anything. Or you can split those limits into 2 or 4 machines if you want.”

For distribution, why not Torrent? Look for somebody to provide “high-performance” servers for downloads I guess but, in the meantime, you really do not need any infrastructure these days just to distribute things like ISO images to people.